Biden; McSame
Fun! Joe Biden, the Democratic choice for the Vice Presidency and thus running mate of Barack Obama, has opened the attack on John McCain. The attack is simple, and will be repeated time and again: John McCain and George W. Bush are the same.
It is an utterly dishonest attack, but Biden uses it nonetheless. ‘Change’ and ‘honesty’ seem to have been thrown overboard, if they were on Obama’s boat at all a few months ago.
“That’s the America Barack Obama and I believe in. That’s the American dream. And ladies and gentlemen, is there no ordinary times, and this is no ordinary election. Because the truth of the matter is, and you know it, that American dream under eight years of Bush and McCain, that American dream is slipping away. I don’t have to tell you that. You feel it in your lives. You see it in your shrinking wages, and the cost of everything from groceries to health care to college to filling up your car at the gas station. It keeps going up and up and up, and the future keeps receding further and further and further away as you reach for your dreams.”
Ah, yes, Bush is destroying the American Dream. Isn’t it obvious? The Dream is being destroyed, it is in danger! It could very well become the American Nightmare! Why? Because of one bad president…
and his secret little helper John McCain.
The rhetoric is obviously over the top - elections aren’t even almost as important as Biden pretends - but the attack against McCain is what’s truly dishonest and despicable. When one compares Bush to McCain it becomes clear rather quickly that the two men are entirely different people, who favor quite different policies. They are both Republicans and, as such, they agree more often with each other than, say, Biden and Bush do, but they are different people who adhere to different ideologies.
Hope and Change™. Of course we all know Obama, The Post-Partisanship™ candidate would never resort to such blatantly dishonest, smear like attacks. Oh no, only the mean evil Republican Attack Machine™ is capable of such Machiavellian ruthlessness.
It is astonishing to see how bad a candidate Obama really is (something I didn’t think I’d be saying a few months ago). He is a walking talking self-parody. It’s amazing that the only real reason that he will probably still edge out a victory is because of the enormous baggage that McCain has to carry because of the GOP. And even with all that, McCain still has a legitimate chance to win, which he absolutely shouldn’t have. Otherwise, it wouldn’t even be a contestant. Poor Obambi would get slaughtered.
Now imagine this astonishlingly self-centered and arrogant (even more than your average politician!!) douchbag with an overwhelming majority in the House, an almost filibuster proof majority in the Senate, a liberal base that has virtually canonized him, a quasi-messianic message in which he intends to save America from her wicked self and a media that is so far up his ass it’s not even a joke. And people thought that the presidency of George W. Bush with a GOP controlled Congress was bad. Wait until they get a load of these clowns.
You what’s also amazing and Biden proves it by this line of attack: if the GOP makes the election about Obama, he has a very very good chance of losing (again, something I thought was unthinkable a few months ago). If the election revolves around McCain, then he has a very very good chance of winning. It seems increasingly clear that the only way the Dems can really win is if they make the election about George W. Bush, who isn’t even running anymore and who incidentally beat them twice before, despite his enormous flaws. Simply amazing.
And the Dems, with Biden and Obama, have nominated two of the most solidly liberal candidates in the Senate and the electorate is supposed to believe that these guys are post-partisan moderates now.
I too wish that this election could stay clear of character attacks, but it’s becoming pretty clear to me that’s not going to be the case.
If you think for a second that McCain’s running mate won’t be out there attacking Obama as a "communist who wants to take all of your money," I’d reconsider that position.
Biden = hope and change? Hardly. More like politics as usual. Obama couldn’t have made a more uninspired choice if he tried.
While Obama’s campaign message tries to mimic the "passing of the torch to the next generation" message of Bill Clinton’s campaign, his choice of Biden clearly indicates he is not the next generation and does not even have the confidence to follow through on this message. Bill Clinton also did not have much foreign policy experience when running, but he had the confidence to chose a Senator of his own generation as his running mate.
If nothing else, Obama’s choice demonstrates that (i) he realizes he doesn’t have the experience to be Commander in Chief, (ii) his message of hope and change are false promises and (iii) he lacks confidence in his own ability, and that of his generation, to take the lead.
Lastly, if Obama uses Biden as his attack dog, it also shows that he is a coward. If Obama wants to attack McCain’s ability to lead, he should do the dirty work himself. Who does Obama think is going to have to take responsibility for making difficult and often unpopular decisions if he is to become president? Is he going to cede to Biden then too?
We’ll all need to get used to these persistent campaign messages:
"McCain is 4 more years of Bush"
"Obama is a ‘not-ready-for-prime-time’ celebrity"
Of course if you rely upon the campaigns to help you understand what the candidates are all about, what do you expect?
An editor put up this article about Joe Biden and his horrible foreign policy. It’s very detailed.
Hey, let’s not forget Obama’s Freudian slip-of-tongue introducing Biden as the "next President of the United States". Shows that Obama, underneath it all, doesn’t even believe in HIS own capacity to lead. :))
Sorry, folks. When a presidential candidate makes a mistake like that, the bashing is fair game.
So I suppose that it’s also fair game to go after McCain:
- Confusing Sunni and Shiia, several times.
- Discussing Czechoslovakia, a country that hasn’t existed since 1990.
- Talking about Putin as the President of Germany.
Or are stupid mistatements only fair game when Obama does them? (I should note that I don’t think the first was such a typo, I think he really didn’t know. Clearly the third WAS a silly confusion, not an actual mistake)
I don’t see how worse a slip of tongue could get. Tit for tat I could go, but won’t do. 57 states may be okay, Buchenwald versus Auschwitz may be fine. Americans don’t necessarily do well with geography so maybe I’ll give Obama a break. Maybe he didn’t know where Georgia was and that’s why he had to revise his statement 3 times before finally recruiting racist Biden to his aid.
And, for everyone out there who adamantly called Obama bashers "racists", I also await a well-thought out argument as to how when Biden does it, it doesn’t count.
But the fact of the matter is, it is "above Obama’s pay level", and he shows it. It doesn’t work well with me when, despite all the show of an inflated ego and the sense of entitlement, when push comes to shove, Obama not only shows that he is unqualified to be the president, but he actually slips it out of his own mouth.
Also about not knowing the difference between Shia and Sunni:
I think this has to do with Americans not being able to understand that Al Qaida, which is a Sunni organization, may very well work and has worked with Shiites in the past to cause trouble in Iraq. If Americans were able to work with Taliban against the "Communists", and if Rumsfeld and Cheney have been known to have cooperated with Saddam against Iran in the past, then it is quite conceivable that during the carnage in Iraq when violence was at its worst, Al Qaida has actually founded all kinds of alliances and even shifted them according to how the situation on the ground progressed. Knowing that Al Qaida has actually worked with certain Sunni groups on the ground against the common "enemy" (which is the U.S. of A.), does not mean that a person cannot differentiate between Sunnis and Shias.
But the media jumped on the opportunity just like they misrepresented the 100 year war comment, which is very understandable given the innumerable gaffes Obama has made. I really don’t blame them, because they are desperate and have nothing else to hold on to. I may have done the same thing if I wanted to see Obama on TV every day as my president.
"Al Qaida has actually worked with certain Sunni groups"
Guys, I just noticed this. My bad. I meant to say certain Shiite groups. See how easy it is to slip?
"Americans don’t necessarily do well with geography so maybe I’ll give Obama a break. "
Obama doesn’t get a break for this one, and here’s why: he’s a frickin’ U.S. Senator.
He should know by now that there are 100 Senators and that each state sends 2.
Or, maybe rather than being ignorant of the constitution of the political body to which he has been elected and is currently a member of, Obama finds "math is hard." Take your pick.
McCain is willing to mess everything up for tiny countries as long as they obediently let the the US transport their energy sources through their territory. His policies are not even half as detailed as Obama’s, his ads reek of Bush’s Rovian dross and he is so addicted to the past he is willing to say that evil can actually be defeated, the fundamental mistake of any human. McCain is comparable to Bush in many ways.
If people can say Obama lacks foreign policy credentials or has made more gaffes than McCain then we might as well call McCain Bush or something worse - we have officially migrated to Memeville.